Little Giants looking for improvement

FREMONT — Fremont Ross football coach Craig Yeast and his staff are trying to tackle perhaps the most difficult question coaches face: How to do you coach effort into players?

Coaching technique is one thing. Correcting the wrong route or adjusting the way a lineman comes off the ball is a relatively straightforward fix.

But what if the issue isn’t a physical shortcoming, but rather the mental commitment to working hard and staying the course when things get tough?

That is when the solution is a much trickier needle to thread and such is the task the Little Giants’ coaches are facing in the wake of last week’s 42-21 loss to Springfield.

“There is not a coach in the country who can tell you how to coach effort,” Yeast said. “We’re putting our kids in the position, and we’re going to continue to do that, but we need our kids to go out and play with great effort.

“We talk about it all the time, if we come out in practice and we’re flat, what can we do, as coaches, to not be flat? Football is game where you’ve got to want to play. Right now we got a lot of going through the motions. A lot of feeling sorry for ourselves. Those are not the things we stand for.”

Some of the players themselves see the fault lies not with the team’s preparation, but in its lack of execution in the moment.

“The coaches are putting us in the right position to make the right plays, that’s not on them, it’s on us for not putting the effort in,” senior linebacker Tyler Schell said. “And that hurts me, as a senior. As a junior, you can say, ‘I had a good game, I don’t have to worry about it.’ But as a senior, I can’t sleep on the weekend because I worry about team and winning games. The coaches are doing their job; we have to do our job and execute.”

Things got no easier this week in practice. Monday’s practice took place in high temperatures while Tuesday’s afternoon showers resulted in sauna-like heat and humidity.

But the practice field isn’t the only place where the climate is turning ugly. Off the field and outside the program, Yeast says his team has to stop listening to outsiders questioning him and his coaches or the team’s methods.

“My message to our kids is, we got to find a way to stop listening to all the negativity outside our locker room,” Yeast said. “If our kids continue to listen to the negativity outside of our locker room, we’re (going to) continue to come in and not listen to exactly what the coaches are teaching you to do. Negativity breeds negativity.”

On top of the all the challenges facing the Little Giants, there is also the opponent they face on the field this week as they play their first road game: The Southview Cougars.

Southview is coming off a 41-6 win against Toledo Rogers last week and finished 7-3 last year. The Cougars possess a pair of talented playmakers in 6-foot-1, 190-pound freshman receiver/running back Jaren Mangham and speedy Isaiah Carter out of the backfield.

Yeast believes Friday night’s game is winnable if the Little Giants play well. A loss, however, would knock Ross to an 0-2 start to the season and already put its playoff hopes into serious jeopardy with little room for error the rest of the season.

“I’m not sure where we are right now (playoff-wise), and I’m not even thinking about playoffs,” Yeast said. “What I’m thinking about is how hard our coaching staff is working and how hard our kids are working and what we’re trying to do to make sure that we block out all of our white noise that’s not in the locker room and that we get our kids on the football field to do exactly what we’re coaching them to do. That’s where we are.”

rmcgowan@gannett.com

419-334-1043

Twitter: @RMcGowan1

IF YOU GO

Who: Fremont Ross at Sylvania Southview

What: Little Giants’ first road game of the season

Where: Southview High School

When: Friday, 7 p.m.

Follow along with the game online at http://www.thenews-messenger.com/ or by following Rich McGowan on Twitter @RMcGowan1